One of the greatest lessons I have learned in my career is that human beings are amazingly resilient. While facilitating support groups, advocating for abused and neglected children, and working with individuals in therapy sessions, I have heard some of the most heartbreaking stories imaginable and come to know people who have survived hell on earth. I have often wondered along with my clients why horrible things happen to innocent people. This questioning is very instinctual, because human beings seek meaning in experience. But a better approach to discovering meaning from trauma is to ask, what is it about people that allows them to overcome it? Every person possesses unique strengths and resources that help them overcome incredible pain, and these strengths and resources need to be discovered to heal self-esteem after trauma. In this post, I will describe the three stages of trauma recovery that people move through as they pursue this process of self-discovery and healing.

The model for trauma recovery follows three stages. This three stage trauma recovery model was developed by a psychiatrist and researcher at Harvard, Dr. Judith Lewis Herman. Through her work, Dr. Herman has improved clinical treatments for trauma and our understanding of resiliency following horrible experiences. Following is a short summary of these three recovery stages.

(1) Re-establishing Safety
During the very first stage following trauma, an individual begins the process of re-establishing safety in their lives. This stage must include strategies for preventing any further trauma or abuse, including strict boundaries with toxic people and family members. This stage also includes strategies for eliminating harm caused by alcohol or drug use, eliminating harm from other risky behaviors, and removing oneself from dangerous environments. Supportive family members, friends, support groups, treatment programs, the legal system, and other healing resources are critical during this stage, because they facilitate this process by helping a survivor maintain healthy environments, structure, routines, and habits in their lives.

Re-establishing psychological and emotional safety is equally important during this stage, and therapy can help with this process by challenging self-destructive core beliefs, negative self-talk, and distorted perspectives that hold a person back from realizing their truth worth and potential. Nightmares, intrusive memories and thoughts, and emotion dysregulation are also points of focus during this stage of re-establishing safety. Another focus of this stage is learning healthy boundaries and relationship skills, including how to evaluate healthy relationships, how to maintain self-respect in relationships, and how to get emotional needs met in relationships effectively. This first stage of healing can take several months, and sometimes years, depending on the individual and their personal circumstances.

(2) Grieving
The second stage of trauma recovery is grieving. After so much loss and pain, a survivor has to release grief that has been trapped and suppressed subconsciously during the times they were surviving trauma. Our psyche has three different functions that help us survive trauma, and one of these functions is to repress emotions and memories that overwhelm us. When terror, fear, rage, and grief are too intense for our conscious mind to understand and process, these emotions are “stored” in the subconscious and reemerge once we are safe again. Often, repressed emotions emerge for someone who has survived trauma once they have achieved sobriety, found a healthy relationship, or started a loving family of their own.

After the immediate threats in our life has been survived, the repressed emotions come knocking because they need to be processed and released. For many survivors, this causes emotional flooding when fear, anger, and sadness are triggered by events or new people in their lives. It can be very uncomfortable and distressing when repressed emotions and memories come to the surface, but it’s important to allow yourself time and space for experiencing them. Journaling is an important practice during this grieving stage, because writing helps us take information from our subconscious and process it with conscious understanding. Traditional therapeutic approaches for facilitating this process include guided exposure to repressed emotions and memories, which can help clients strengthen their abilities to manage these experiences and lessen avoidance and repression of them.

(3) Re-Connection
After a person has established safety in their life and done the work of processing repressed emotions and memories during the grieving stage, the final step in healing is to re-connect with their core values, unique interests, and their greater purpose. Several consequences of trauma are that it severs our connection to love, hope, happiness, self-esteem, trust, power and control, and intimacy with others. After physical needs for safety are met again, it’s important for a survivor to re-establish healthy ways for fulfilling unmet emotional needs from years of abuse or neglect.

During the re-connection phase, individuals work on healing their relationships with themselves, other people, and their relationship to the larger world.
There are many therapeutic activities that facilitate this stage. One project we often work on in therapy is developing the Life Story. This project involves writing a narrative about the experiences in our lives, and how they allowed us to discover our inner strengths, values, and purpose. I’ve had many clients work on their Life Story through other creative means, including poetry, painting, photography, and scrapbooking. All people have a narrative or understanding of their life story that plays in the background of their minds, but when we bring this story to conscious awareness through writing or other creative processes, we take control of that story and re-write it as our own hero’s journey.

Your Healing Journey
If you are struggling with any of these stages of healing from trauma, please reach out to a therapist. Although the inner work will be completed by you, you should not go through this process alone. Your healing process through therapy will require courage and hope that you can receive the care, attention, and support that you deserve and need. To find a therapist new you, please visit PsychologyToday.com or BetterHelp.com.